The real heart of open source lies in its potential to be greater than the sum of its parts, the capacity to leverage the talent and abilities of an entire community of developers and users who are striving towards a common goal, according to an editorial at Linux Insider.

Used to think "open source" is like "communism" where everybody does the work and nobody makes any money (maybe somebody is still not making money . But now I see some good aspect of it: it's like the "internet" of software development -- it's a cooperative effort.

Nodes of internet cooperate to form a big network. Pieces of open source software cooperate to form a software system, like Linux.

It's not perfect and sometimes seems "messy" and uncontrolled, but as a community, somebody can build something useful out of it, maybe even something that one likes.